In the past day alone, I have received four marketing/communications emails that are indicative of a huge amount of carelessness or ignorance or both. In each case, spending a bit more time checking the following would result in a more effective email.
Check you spelling without depending on spell check
“Your invited to join us” was in the subject line of one email and in the the body of another. Depending on spell check without actually reading your email will let this type of ignorant email go through. In case you’re wondering what is wrong with that line, please read this sentence.
Check dates carefully
I got an invitation for an event taking place on Monday, September 20th. Except that September 20th is a Friday. And it turns out the event is actually on Monday, September 16th.
Be careful with automated replies
As you read yesterday, this blog’s feed was not appearing in Feedly. I wrote Feedly and I got an automated response (I didn’t realize it was automated at the time) telling me that it was due to a capacity issue. Feedly’s Twitter person told me this:
it is not a capacity issue. That is an old automated email. I have asked our dev lead to look into this. Expect and answer today. -Ed
I realize that sometimes it’s necessary for customer service to send an automated response due to volume or because of the need to acknowledge communication. But, email communications should not be misleading or just plain wrong.
The bottom line is check and then check again!
Email marketing may be very effective, but if you send out the wrong information, with incorrect spelling or grammar, you will not only not achieve your communications goals, you will appear ignorant and/or careless.
About Deborah Brody
Deborah Brody writes and edits anything related to marketing communications. Most blog posts are written under the influence of caffeine.
Years ago, a colleague of mine had a company sign off on proofs, printing for a brochure – only the company name was wrong. They’d been signing off on proofs many steps along the way, the mistake never caught until it printed. I’ve been there, we all have – clients send you the wrong dates, the wrong spellings, expect you to fix their mistakes or just intuit their true meaning (sometimes whilst not paying you to do review/edit, just to ‘do’ .. eye roll).
I read and reread my emails, my blog comments, almost anything. Typos are so hard in this fast, fast get it done in 2 minutes world. Harder to check your own work, even the obvious can slip past you. Harder to make sure your meaning is clear. Like anything else, at best you appear careless, sloppy when you mess up; at worst you miss a key opportunity, offend your best customer or lose that perfect hire. Then worse gets worse, when your dirty laundry goes public, goes social – damaging your brand reputation and you have to invest in damage control rather than building your biz. So, check – then check again. FWIW.
Hi Davina,
We are human and mistakes get made, BUT, some are more preventable than others. It seems many are just not trying hard enough. It is one thing to have one typo/mistake and another to have emails full of them, or many times in a row. I agree, check it and have others check it.
Cheers!
Deborah